Oracle Blog

Eric Sharakan's weblog

Thursday Oct 11, 2007

Sun is officially announcing the first products in its UltraSPARC T2 (US T2) based platform lineup today, the T5x20 series. You can read all about the details here and here. There are two big stories here related to our Logical Domains technology. For those of you who are new to my blog, Logical Domains (LDoms for short) is the name of Sun's virtualization technology for our SPARC CMT platforms that allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single system.

These products represent the first of our CMT based platforms that are shipping with LDoms technology pre-installed from the factory. All future CMT servers from Sun will ship with the ability to run Logical Domains out of the box. This includes the LDoms-enabled hypervisor (our LDoms hypervisor runs on bare metal, and is embedded in the firmware of the platform), all the necessary Solaris components, and the LDoms Manager package (which is what my team works on).

This further represents the introduction of version 1.0.1 of LDoms technology. Besides support for the new US T2 based platforms (and a slew of bug fixes), this release supports the ability to reset any domain, even one which owns physical I/O devices, while all other domains continue to run. Even the control domain, i.e. the one on which the LDoms Manager runs, can reboot while all other domains stay up. This represents a major step forward in terms of RAS capability for LDoms.

As of today, LDoms version 1.0.1 is only available pre-installed on our newly announced US T2 based servers. Stay tuned here for information on the impending availability of this upgrade on our existing US T1 based platforms!

UPDATE: LDoms version 1.0.1 is now available for download here. This includes the firmware updates for US T1 platforms.

WARNING: There are two important caveats when upgrading from LDoms 1.0 to LDoms 1.0.1:

Configurations saved to the service processor under 1.0 are not usable under 1.0.1. The LDoms 1.0.1 Administration Guide describes the upgrade procedure that needs to be applied to work around this. Part of this procedure needs to be carried out BEFORE performing the actual upgrade!

You must upgrade both the firmware and LDom Manager components at the same time.